What goes missing in the analysis of energy sources is their geostrategic impact. The vast majority of government motivations for 'green energy' is geostrategic.
Oil/coal/etc. is distributed 'unhelpfully' for western and asian interests, and it's use once. So the countries which have it must be permanently available for oil trade. Whereas with green energy, barring the provision of somewhat renewable metal supply, states do not need particularly complex diplomatic relationships.
The reason for the world's attention now being drawn to the middle east isn't as simple as Hamas. Europe needs trade open from the middle east, and it needs oil. This is at the heart of trying to balance interests in the region wrt israel.
Both china, us and europe are overwhelmingly against any disruption in the region which is why it hasnt spiraled into a full-blown regional conflict yet.
Issues such as these play strongly on the minds of states as they try to transition. China's "going green" because its a net importer, and very worried about its dependence on russia and the middle east.
This, I think, should give us hope. Whilst going green is an economic hit, it's a massive security boost. And states almost always trade wealth for security (, since, in the end, without secrutiy your wealth will disappear).
I don't agree that the "vast majority" of government motivations for green energy are "geostrategic". Some of it is but much is clearly driven by genuine concern about the environment by elected representatives.
If Germany were most motivated by energy independence they would not have closed so many nuclear power plants. There are in fact lots of decisions that politicians make that are inconsistent with aiming for strategic benefits but are consistent with an earnest (and sometimes quixotic) concern for the environment. If the UK was so bent on energy independence we would have made more progress on heat pumps. Yet gas boilers (lifespan: 15 years) are still being fitted today. In truth, governments thing about energy security a bit, they think about green stuff a bit and they aren't always very effective agents of change...
I also think you're not right to imply that energy production largely happens as a result of government direction. In fact, energy prices are high at the moment and the prospect of profit drives development of green energy a great deal (not that subsidies don't have an effect as well).
To be honest (and I hope I'm not straying into a personal attack here - that's not intended) I think your viewpoint sounds clever because it is cynical. Cynical views - especially the attribution of an ulterior motive - usually sound clever. But I think your post is at best partly right and perhaps even mostly wrong. Political realism is a drug to take only in small doses.
EU obviously has many reasons to shift to renewables, but a huge amount of urgency was provided by the Russia/Ukraine war. There was both effort to shift supply to other countries, and reduce overall demand.
"A regulation on co-ordinated demand reduction measures for gas: This targets a 15% voluntary reduction in EU gas demand between 1 August 2022 and 31 March 2023, compared with its five-year average. The European Commission has adopted the European Gas Demand Reduction Plan with best practices and guidance for member states to help them reduce gas demand."
"In March 2022, the European Commission and International Energy Agency presented joint plans to reduce reliance on Russian energy, reduce Russian gas imports by two thirds within a year, and completely by 2030.[15][16]
In April 2022, the European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said "the era of Russian fossil fuels in Europe will come to an end".[17] On 18 May 2022, the European Union published plans to end its reliance on Russian oil, natural gas and coal by 2027."
"A fully open study from Zero Lab at Princeton University published in July 2022 and based on the GenX framework concluded that reliance on Russia gas could end by October 2022 under the three core scenarios they investigated – which ranged from high coal usage to accelerated renewables deployment.[63][64][needs update] All three cases would result in falling greenhouse gas emissions, relative to business as usual."
Nuclear energy has only contributed to 10% of electricity generation in Germany - not to the total energy supply. Furthermore, nuclear energy is far from being self-sufficient. Germany and France import (or imported) uranium from Russia. In quantities that Russia could not provide if it did not itself source uranium from other countries (which Germany, at least, decided not to import uranium from due to a self-imposed commitment). This adds to the dependency on Russia and other countries regarding the remainder of the nuclear fuel cycle.
Then there's coal, oil, and gas. Reducing these is the mammoth task in terms of energy self-sufficiency and independency. Nuclear was marginal at best. France will be a different (very problematic) story…
Gerhard Schröder was one of the strongest political voices behind the de-nuclearization of Germany. After his chancellorship he was on the board of Rosneft and was appointed to Gazprom's board but I believe didn't end up taking it.
Read into that what you will, but it sounds very geopolitical to me.
Gerhard Schröder did not care one bit about nuclear. He was in a coalition with the Greens who wanted to get rid of all nuclear power plants (whose fuel, by the way, mostly comes from Russia if I recall it correctly). He was Putin's best friend, though.
When Merkel took over, she stopped or delayed the closing down of the NPPs only to speed it up again significantly after Fukushima.
> whose fuel, by the way, mostly comes from Russia if I recall it correctly
Currently, sure. But it's possible to load enough nuclear fuel from Australia on a rowboat to power Germany for 10 years (that would be about a suitcase).
That would have been quite a feat of divination. Schroeder was chancellor until 2005 while Fukushima happened in 2011 (during Merkel's government, which actually had pushed the nuclear exit further into the future at first and then rolled back that decision after Fukushima).
The important event was Chernobyl in 1986, from then on it was pretty much clear that Germany would leave nuclear power behind (and this was the Green party's main agenda, and what made them 'big' during the 90's).
I don’t get Fukushima driving a worry about nuclear but not about tsunami or earthquake which killed orders of magnitude more and caused Fukushima in the first place.
Nuclear powerplants exploding have a tendency to make pretty large swaths of land uninhabitable for decades or centuries, in a densely populated country like Germany that's a bit of a problem.
GAU = "Grösster Anzunehmender Unfall" roughly translates to "maximum conceivable accident", almost exclusively used for nuclear accidents (or sarcastically for lesser problems, like accidentally deleting a database without a backup at hand).
The fact that this is a very common German word should tell you something about the complicated relationship of the Germans to nuclear energy ;)
The 'nuclear exit' was officially started in the early 2000s under Schroeder (in coalition with the Greens), then the Merkel government actually extended the nuclear power plant lifetime again, then Fukushima happened and the lifetime extension was rolled back on pressure from the public.
While Schroeder might have had his own interests in mind and eventually became Putin's useful idiot, the shutdown of nuclear power was a popular opinion in Germany at least as far back as Chernobyl and then reinforced by Fukushima.
Maybe this is hard to imagine for people living in the US, but as someone who grew up in a region where we were not allowed to do certain things, eat certain stuff and many people know mothers that gave birth to deformed children after the radioactive rains following Chernobyl — the dangers of the technology are much more present on the minds here than in regions that have not been affected.
No countries are "bent on energy dependence", because it isnt feasible.
The day-to-day idle chatter of your local representative is really irrelevant over the time horizons of a green transition. This is cultural ideological wash. If there were no security or economic basis for green transition, it would fail upon contact with any non-trivial security or economic issue.
Consider that the UK fired up coal plants when energy prices rose too much. Did it really ask the public to be colder for awhile? Of course not. Ours do not suffer, but theirs (be it india, china, africa...) well they ought not use coal that causes climate change!
The idea that green transition could happen for "values" reasons is ahistorical nonsense -- the values of all countries are the prosperity and the survival of their nation, and anything which threatens this will be handled ruthlessly.
It's rather dangerous to hold any stock in the idle ramblings of politicians speaking under no material duress -- they will say anything and promise anything, as will any of us, when it's cheap to do so. This is hot air. A kind of hot air the rest of the world now understands the west produces with abandon, it is now clear to everyone outside our countries what sort of propaganda we prefer. And it is this sort (moralising about values in the summer, ruthless hypocrisy in the winter).
So my comment here is to point out, to those who can take a longer view of these issues than that printed in newspapers, that there are macro forces at work preserving the green transition -- which is quite reassuring.
In the world we're entering, security competition is returning and this will be a significant drive of war-time-like funding behind energy transition. This is great news.
You're no doubt right that much of the current political class is unaware and unfit to transition their thinking fast enough to handle this; but they will. Most politicians of the last 200 years thought this way quite naturally.
The youngest nuclear power plants in Germany were opened in 1989 after at least six years of built time, with planning going back much further. The last East German opened just weeks before the wall came down and took 13 years to build and closed within the same month. On top of that, you simply can't run a nuclear power plant forever. Germany's nuclear power plants ran an average of 32 years, and I doubt that US power plants will run those 80 years they intend for some https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=228&t=21
To keep a 30 year old nuclear power plant safe you will sure see time of maintenance increasing, thus reducing its output. A 30 year old solar panel? Take it off your roof, recycle the old one, put a new one on and we can be sure it will be more efficient. Just this simplicity when replacing panels makes it a no-brainer.
Granted, the blades of wind turbines are still not being recycled, but they slowly get there.
I don’t see why it has to be due to environmental concern. At the end of the day, the world is complex and if political pressures force countries to adopt green policies, who cares.
That said, I think energy independence is a really major concern but one that few countries actually do something about. I personally believe Merkel shut down the nuclear reactors due to popular appeal more than anything to her own party’s benefit.
Energy independence is extremely important. During the height of winter 2022, Russia was pressuring Europe to abandon Ukraine and with Russia being Europe’s major supplier of natural gas, the upcoming cold winter meant that Russia had a lot of leverage, being able to force Europe to decide between freezing or weakening support for Ukraine. In the end, the US decided to ship an exceptional amount of natural gas to Europe (over 74% of natural gas produced in the US went to Europe during that time!) as a major foreign policy move in pursuit of its main goal of keeping Ukraine independent by ensuring continuing Europe support. Unfortunately, it had a direct cost on me and everyone because my natural gas bill during those months was literally the highest it has ever been.
Russia did more than that. Already in the summer 2021 Gazprom reduced and later stopped the supply of gas to the spot market. Then Gazprom rented storage space but didnt fill it. All this to make Europe more vulnerable to the blackmail after the invasion, which luckily was delayed enough to fall flat for that winter.
Apparently later Gazprom Germania planned some actual sabotage that was prevented.
This is the main reason why China is accelerating renewables. Renewables solves their energy sovereignty problem which they are very stressed about. If they decide to invade Taiwan, they have no easy solution to an oil blockade. They only have ~3 months of strategic reserves. They're fine on coal (albeit they can't really expand use that much, they can just keep it steady), it's oil that's the issue.
The other 4 reasons are smog over cities, growing political leverage of the domestic renewables industry, climate change, and the improving learning curve making it financially pragmatic.
I think this provides a framework for how to market renewables to a domestic conservative political audience. It's cheaper, yes, but primarily it's good for national security and sovereignty. It's even better for individual sovereignty if we're talking about individual household solar, whereas oil and gas makes the individual beholden to the state or corporations (or worse, a foreign hostile state).
Only if you are off-grid, otherwise without the grid you have no power unless you get a setup that uses an inverter that is of an entirely different class than the ones commonly used. And then you need a substantial amount of local storage as well and you're going to have an absolutely minimal energy budget in the winter.
A 50KWh capacity battery will last a very energy efficient house < 5 days.
For grid independence you need to have either multiple redundant sources of energy and a backup generator (which consumes a fossil fuels), an absolutely massive battery (far larger than is economically feasible) or a grid hookup.
I've reduced the energy consumption of our house about as far as it will go without seriously affecting quality of life, and yet it won't go down below 500 W draw on average, so about 10 KWh on a daily basis. On an annual basis we're 7.7MWh surplus but in winter we are net consumers. Starting March 1st we are in the plus on a daily basis and we could - if we had a battery, which we do not - be neutral. But we're still heating with gas and that leaves four months to cover or about 120 days.
During those 120 days we consume 4 times 350 KWh, so 1400 KWh or thereabouts and produce about 700 KWh with the biggest gap near the solstice in December (due to the very short days). It is simply not feasible to bridge that gap with batteries and we also consume about 450 cubic meters of gas per month in that period, which for a house this type and size is actually pretty good.
So I don't buy the 'personal autonomy' argument unless you want to cut your winter consumption to ~30% of your summer consumption, set your house to 14 degree room temperature (in many households that would be grounds for divorce) or get a 500 KWh battery system, which would set you back approximately $300K at the best prices that I can find today. I don't think that's worth it.
Depends where you live, some places have more consistent sun across the year. Regarding personal autonomy, I wouldn't treat it as this binary thing. If you're survivalist minded, solar is your only hope at any level of independence, even if it's not 24/7 autonomy.
> Depends where you live, some places have more consistent sun across the year.
Everything depends on where you live. But for any country more than a few degrees off the equator that's the reality.
> Regarding personal autonomy, I wouldn't treat it as this binary thing.
That's fair, but 'personal autonomy' for 70% of the year and utterly dependent on existing infrastructure and fossil fuels for the remainder is still bad. But better than 100% dependency, sure.
> If you're survivalist minded, solar is your only hope at any level of independence, even if it's not 24/7 autonomy.
Depends on where you live ;)
Seriously: I engage in engineering, not in satisfying paranoia and 'any level of independence' starts with ruthlessly curbing your energy budget below that which most Western countries' inhabitants would consider acceptable living standards. And even if I personally would be ok with that I don't see how I would make that decision for myself while at the same time not make that decision for those around me who depend on me for their needs. In a vacuum you can make that argument, but IRL people don't live in a vacuum.
How many people have their own oil pump in the back yard? And are self sufficient with food?
No man is an island.
In an extreme situation when you have no grid for a week then yes, having to slum it by only heating one room.
Every house having 50kwh would allow massive grid smoothing when wind and solar are fluctuating. Just one day of storage would allow a lot of arbitrage, but when power is cheap overnight and run solely off battery when it’s expensive.
I'd love to switch to a situation like that, tomorrow, please. But the reality is that unless such lack of comfort is shared people will simply not agree to it. It would be symbolic at best.
In an off-grid situation you run the panels through a fairly straightforward battery charger, and you never let the battery be depleted all the way so a blackstart situation would normally not occur. That's an indication that something went terribly wrong in managing your battery, it likely would damage the battery beyond recovery.
In Canada, it didn't take more than a couple of hours before the fabric of society started to break down during the big power outage for the North-East of the North American continent. The grid was down for more than a week in some places and we were very fortunate to be mostly off-grid by then and to have two massive backup generators as well as a gas station full of fuel. If not for us being prepared the region where we lived would have been much harder affected. Strangely enough, us new immigrants to the region were better prepared for this than those that had lived there all of their lives, they just took the grid instability for granted. If that outage had happened in the dead of winter instead of in August many people would have died.
With the article about Europe, I'll note the average house here uses half the electricity of your very efficient Canadian house (probably more gas for heating though).
And it's in much of Europe where a village or a few villages being without power for a day or more is headline news.
> With the article about Europe, I'll note the average house here uses half the electricity of your very efficient Canadian house (probably more gas for heating though).
No, we were way ahead of our efficient house here in Europe because we were able to design that efficiency right into the structure. That house sipped power and the heater ran off the damaged trees on the property that we cleaned out annually.
I kept pretty careful logs of consumption before pulling the trigger on going off-grid and it's interesting to see how the reduction in consumption factored as much into that as the increase in renewable energy. Once the windmill was added the generator basically never ran again.
It is an important point - here in Australia we don't have adequate onshore fuel reserves and we have only two or three remaining oil refineries, meaning the vast majority of our fuel is refined offshore and imported. This means basically our entire transport industry would fall over in (if I recall) around 20 days if our shipping was blockaded.
But I think you're wrong on one point - going green isn't an economic hit in the scheme of things - even not counting the possibly incredibly high costs of climate change into the future (food insecurity, more frequent and more severe weather disasters, etc.) - renewable generation is cheap, and storage is also getting cheaper every year. Energy efficiency improvements have also seen demand trending down even as populations increase and there is a push towards electrification. Meanwhile nuclear has always been pretty expensive, and coal and gas prices have been fairly high in recent years. With some demand management, more distributed storage, new battery technologies, economies of scale etc., the cost of highly renewable grids is not likely to be a big deal.
I read recently about South Australia and what they've achieved with transitioning their grid in no time at all. It gives me hope it might happen (in time?) through sheer self interest.
South Australia also has a de-salination plant to protect against drought and the other states over-using the main river that runs through them. As well the steel plant is trying to go green through a local hydrogen electrolysis plant (an article related was on the frontpage today).
Both processes running off a renewable grid is a great step forward.
As someone living there presently rooftop solar is massively subsidised and an obvious choice given our near year round sun. A standard install is approx. $5k AUD ($3.5k USD) and will produce 30kw/h or more on a sunny day, this means a summer energy bill is around $100 for the 3 months (those that locked in higher buyback rates can even make money off the provider in summer).
We just need better/cheaper storage solutions, as a $10k Tesla battery just doesn't stack up.
Solar is subsidised here, but not massively anymore - it's more the huge demand and pretty competitive market that keeps things cheap I think. My 6.6 kW solar system had a subsidy of about $1,750 so I paid around $6500, and unfortunately when I installed it (2019), I was already about six or seven years too late to get locked in feed-in pricing (and it's already dropped since I installed the system). Panels are a bit cheaper now so yeah 5 kW for $5K is definitely in the realm of possibility but the rebate is dropping over time.
Back in the early 2010s, it was very heavily subsidised for sure, my father managed to get in then and even with a system half the size of mine he hasn't paid for a power bill since... The system was a lot more expensive to install per kilowatt then but the feed-in tariff he gets is insane and is still locked in for another five years or so...
Well, U.S. produces a lot more oil than it consumes and can supply most of Europe's net imports this way. Counting in Canada, in a pinch, North America and EU put together, can make do with just the (fossil fuel) energy supplies of their own.
So what you say was the case 20 years ago but no longer. Energy supply-wise, U.S. does not care about Middle East at all, and Western world overall, only somewhat cares, but it's not a major concern, not like it was in 1970s let alone not like it was in 2000s.
I guess it would be possible to see the Saudi-Iran (now dead) reconsiliation, mediated by China; and the Saudi-Israel (now dead) reconsiliation mediated by the US --- as made-possible by these issues.
Though, I suspect, most of that shift comes from the US now being an energy exporter because of shale. If that had been the case earlier, it seems likely the iraq war wouldnt have happened, in that there would be no motivation for the US to 'improve' the region.
It also seems likely that US support for Israel may end with increasing shale and increasing green energy. It's hard to image the severe consequences the US has faced for support will outweigh the value of having a stronghold in the region.
Perhaps Israel might sense this waning US dependence on the ME, and this may be part of its prior attempt to normalise relations with SA, etc. It has always struck me that one of the precipitating issues 'in the air' for Hamas was likely a concern for israeli-arab friendships forming.
If that were to happen, presumably the arab-world sentiment about israel could shift against them, and that would be a catastrophe for Palestinian interests.
It's quite plausible then that much of what we see at the moment is partly a result of US shale plus long term concerns about green transition.
This is a very US-centric view. The things you mention might have an impact but not everything that happens is just due to what the US does. Israel wants to normalize relations with neighbors because that's what any country wants to do in order to keep existing (also, if the US is a factor here, it's mainly in pushing hard diplomatically for normalization of Israeli relations with arab countries).
The Suni (Saudi arabia) vs Shia (Iran) divide currently dominates power politics in the middle east. This is also what motivates Israel's foreign policy (and also Iran's and Hamas' actions). Since the start of the war in Afghanistan, the US has been trying to excert military influence in the region without investing either troops or money. Afghanistan shows how that tends to work out. US influence on the region is at a historic low both economically and politically.
You say this, but then plot a graph of "historic interest of the US in the ME" against, "oil dependency on the middle east" -- you'll find out why US influence is at a historic low.
The widthdrawl from afganistan wouldntve happened without shale, america would be giving up a overwhelming order-imposing capacity in the region to induce chaos; that wouldnt make sense if it needed the ME as it did in the 2000s.
It's not entirely clear how relationships would exist in the ME if it wasnt the site of great power resource competition. The superstructure of the current setup, indeed the borders of the countries we are talking about, are drawn by these issues.
You are indeed agreeing with me when you say that part of what's happening is waning US "influence" (really: interest) -- the US has had, since obama, an explicit ME withdrawl policy that it's never been able to fully execute.
What we are, indeed, seeing are the effects of that withdrawl over time.
> then plot a graph of "historic interest of the US in the ME" against, "oil dependency on the middle east"
I'd love to see such a plot :D
One would have to come up with some proxy-metrics to stand in (one shouldn't use explicit axis labels though, that would destroy the nice vibe of having such a plot). There might be dozens of plausible versions of such a plot that might even differ enough to allow any claim one wants.
A bit ignorant to think we don't need oil anymore. Only about 40% of a barrel of oil is used towards gasoline. Many important things in our world, including parts used in electric cars, wind turbines, and solar panels, all have some parts from oil.
The geostrategic impact is the most important point my eyes as well. Except for the USA, Norway and Britain pretty much all of the West's oil is from autocratic countries. Every wind generator, every solar panel that we put into use now will reduce that consumption for decades to come. Only an increase of energy consumption would work against this, but for example the EU is very much pushing it's citizens to save energy, even something small like LED light bulbs will contribute.
Putin's war on Ukraine and the outfall in form of the EU reducing its gas addiction will mean that Russia is loosing millions of gas consumers not just for the duration of the war, but forever. Europe replaces its gas heating installations with other systems and pushes for better insulation. No one will go back to gas no matter how Putin's insane war ends.
As a cyclist I'm not a fan of car and the current EVs, but once batteries take that big hurdle and production isn't reliant on China, all the money sent to autocrats to buy oil and lithium batteries will stay in the West. I'm all for that.
But also need to consider industry hallowing out due to lack of access to cheap gas as feedstock not energy, see EU's contracting PMI. At the end of the day, it also matters for geoeconomics if you don't have access to cheaper inputs than your competitors, especially if it leads to industrial death spiral that's difficult to recover from the longer it lasts.
I'm sorry but this article is full of nonsense. I'm a firm proponent of renewable energy so I'd like it to be true, but there is no way in the world that the drop in gas- and coal energy generation in the EU last year was caused by the uptake of wind and solar.
The article states:
> Europe’s coal electricity generation tanked by 26% and gas by 15% in 2023
According to links below, EU's solar generation went up 25% in 2023, wind energy by 15%.
But to put the numbers in perspective: total solar generated energy accounted for 259.99 GW in 2023, wind energy for 221 GW. In 2022, total energy consumption in the EU was 3300 GW (I couldn't find the numbers for 2023). With other words, the increase of renewable energy accounted for only 2% of the EU's total consumption.
So the drop in coal and gas production must have had other reasons, such as e.g. the soft winter.
For a summary look at the "What drove the record fall in EU fossil fuel electricity generation in 2023?" graphic.
The reductions are as follows:
* -90 TWh - Rising wind and solar generation
* -50 TWh - Rebound in hydro and nuclear generation
* -94 TWh - Electricity demand fall
The area graph "How the EU's electricity mix has evolved over time" gives you a good idea of the impact renewables have made on electricity generation.
In 2023 China added more solar and wind power production to its grid than its annual consumption growth. People just see that they are still adding coal but they are reaching the tipping point where coal for electricity has started being replaced with renewables. With all the battery and solar production being added in the next few years I think they will also rapidly remove coal from their grid.
The Chinese are not adding coal and nuclear because it is cheap (it isn't, even for them) but because they can't yet produce enough renewables to completely cover their needs. They have a very rational plan for eventually transitioning away from coal. But it's a long term plan.
However renewables are covering most of the new generation at this point and certainly much more than they were expecting even a few years ago. What happened there is that price performance improved much more rapidly than expected; so world + dog, the Chinese included, are rolling out wind, solar, and batteries as fast as they can. A second thing that they probably weren't expecting is that they just became the top car manufacturer in the world. And most of that success is based on Chinese battery companies being extremely successful. So, they are churning out a lot of batteries. And of course grid and domestic batteries are also booming. Batteries are important because they help improve the capacity factor of existing solar and wind. So, they are deploying more capacity than planned and it's performing better than expected.
At this point things are actually looking pretty good for renewables and we can expect some of the coal to start disappearing from their grid pretty soon. Coal plant pollution is a big issue in China and they'll want to get rid of coal as soon as they can afford to. Coal is at this point a stop gap solution for them a necessary and costly evil. Getting rid of nuclear is less important to them but I would not be surprised to see a few of their planned construction being postponed or cancelled as they might simply not need the capacity and nuclear plants are expensive.
A complicating factor is the bursting real estate bubble in China. That's going to impact funding for all sorts of things. Including new electricity generation (renewable and non renewable). But they'll likely focus on reducing the expensive stuff; which would be nuclear plants. And they'll double down on the parts of their economy that actually do work; which would be renewable energy, EVs, etc. Their export market is looking very strong. So, investing in renewables boosts those exports too.
>With all the battery and solar production being added in the next few years I think they will also rapidly remove coal from their grid.
Is this irony? You can't seriously think the Chinese Communist Party will stop using coal until they run out of it. Why would they? They are a terror based dictatorship that harvests organs from "undesirable" people for profit, and perform an actual genocide today as we speak. Do you think they care about man man made climate change? Why would they? The poorer and more desperate people are the easier they are to control. One doesn't have to look far (North Korea) for examples of this.
You can't trust a single number that comes out of China, their own foreign affairs guy admitted their numbers are "man made" a couple years ago. Also deindustrialisation of the West is in their great interest so they will pretend they are "ditching coal" while opening new brown(the dirtiest kind) coal fired power plants every week or so.
You know when they will stop using coal? When there is another way to generate energy that is predictable, cheaper and relatively easy to build. Neither renewables nor battery storage is that. Especially when you have huge deposits of brown coal just beneath the surface nearby.
Interestingly, in the years before the US managed to do more about their CO2 emissions than Europe. That's because thanks to fracking the US move a large share of their energy generation towards natural gas, which burns 'cleaner' than oil and coal. The EU has (almost?) no fracking.
And in an even greater tragedy: the Germans had turned their back on almost emission free nuclear power, and in practice had turned towards very dirty coal.
> US managed to do more about their CO2 emissions than Europe. That's because thanks to fracking the US move a large share of their energy generation towards natural gas, which burns 'cleaner' than oil and coal
The climate benefits of the lower CO2 emissions from burning gas, instead of coal and oil, are partially offset be the greater methane emissions. Then again, you can't compare natural gas CO2 + CH4 emissions to only CO2 from coal, as coal production also releases CH4.
As long as methane leaks from the natural gas supply are below 4% or 5%, gas is better than coal.
Over those 12 years, methane "decays" to CO2 and water vapor, both greenhouse gases in their own right. And before it decays, it has a much stronger warming effect than either. So a ton of methane is strictly worse than a ton of CO2 in absolutely every way.
Natural gas is not "clean". Moreover, it is well known that the biggest problem with gas is the production of methane during extraction that is MUCH more dangerous than CO2.
Regarding Germany, the switch is temporary (geopolitical), and they still produce less CO2 every year as planned and have a strong CO2 phase-out plan.
Methane has approximately 28x the warming effect of CO2 in those 10 years, and ultimately it breaks down... To CO2 and water. So every ton of CH4 is like 28 tons of CO2 in the medium term, and like 1+ tons of CO2 in the long term (since water vapor is also a GHG).
It's still CO2 emissions at the end of the day. The issue is nuclear power is right there as the better option. At the end of the day natural gas is still liberating carbon which was locked away and won't be put back anytime soon.
This myth keeps on perpetuating. But if you look at the numbers, coal generation in Germany has basically been in a slow decline since it peaked about fifteen years ago, which is also when they started getting rid of nuclear, which was never a big part of their energy generation. Coal usage could have been declining faster of course without that. And recent events have made Russian gas a bit less attractive and they burned a bit more coal. But now that the gas crisis is contained, they'll get back on track cleaning up the energy economy. Winter is coming to an end here and absolutely nobody is talking about cold showers and lowering the heating here anymore like last year.
LNG is expensive so they have some incentive to get rid of their dependency on that. It doesn't really make sense to use that for electricity generation.
I'm not super hopeful they will be able to completely get rid of coal by the 2030s like they have been insisting they will. But it will eventually get done. And it's one of those things where the more coal gets shut down, the more attractive it gets to get rid of the rest as well.
That's also why they got rid of their last three nuclear plants. I agree, not their wisest move, but on the other hand it kind of focused them on a future without nuclear. Which, like it or not, seems what they've committed to. I don't see that change anytime soon. Those three plants disappearing is in the past. It's done. Next up is shutting down brown coal. That's something some parties are still resisting. But they are under a lot of pressure to get rid of this embarrassingly dirty industry.
> That's also why they got rid of their last three nuclear plants. I agree, not their wisest move, but on the other hand it kind of focused them on a future without nuclear. Which, like it or not, seems what they've committed to.
And I don't even blame politics: it's what voters want.
Regarding the US switch to natural gas electricity and the closing of coal plants - it seems that a good fraction of the US-produced thermal coal is still being shipped overseas, particularly to India(36%) but also The Netherlands(13%), Egypt(9%), Morocco(7%), Japan(6%) and China(5%):
> "The thermal coal export earnings were the second-highest since 2017, following 2022's $5.7 billion. The total volumes were the highest since 2018 and came as U.S. power producers cut the amount of coal used in electricity generation to the lowest this century."
Someone probably needs to explain to the green clean energy enthusiasts setting policy these days that it really doesn't matter where you burn the coal, at least from a global atmospheric standpoint (though not for local pollution fallout of sulfur and mercury and arsenic). However, hindering fossil fuel exports appears unlikely for any US government, see the LNG exports to Asia and Europe over 2023:
> Someone probably needs to explain to the green clean energy enthusiasts setting policy these days that it really doesn't matter where you burn the coal, at least from a global atmospheric standpoint (though not for local pollution fallout of sulfur and mercury and arsenic).
True but sadly these things are measured by country. Which is unfortunate because if you're going to burn the stuff anyway, shipping it across the world does add significantly to its emissions of course.
The US government has now paused approval for new LNG exports [1]. This was big news in Germany because their government is betting on US LNG to replace Russian gas imports and wants to expand natural gas use to complement renewables (peaker plants) and phase out coal.
I honestly do not fault Europe for not pursuing fracking. If you haven't spent much time over here it's not easy as an American to appreciate just how little "empty space" there is on the continent. There is really no where that doesn't impact communities of people. The us can easily afford to basically throw a few little towns in Oklahoma under the bus and no one really notices or cares. That's just possible here. Too many damned humans, and too many teetering systems.
Could you imagine the outcry if a fracking induced earthquake took down a 13th century church someplace? No one wants that.
"Nearly 50 villages in this region have been evacuated and destroyed for the ever-expanding mines, and Winzen's village of Keyenberg — more than a thousand years old — is set to be next.": https://www.npr.org/2021/06/28/1010956116/a-coal-mining-mons...
Just as an aside, apparently the company doing this, RWE, was the #1 producer of CO2 emissions in Europe in 2018 ( https://archive.is/Qe9KJ ). All I can say is, the sooner renewable energy takes over, the better.
Between September 30 and October 27, 1975, the church was moved a distance of 841.1 meters at a velocity of 13 centimeters per minute to the vicinity of the old hospital, and it was set on an iron-concrete two-storied foundation. A small church of St. Ghost was also moved during October. After the move was completed, restoration work went on until 1988, and the church was solemnly blessed again in 1993.
I happen to live in a very old European village that is being damaged by fracking to the point where homes became uninhabitable. I’ve been fighting the government for the money to replace the house they’ve forced me out of for the past 5 years. There are some who respond to you by saying this can be solved with money but that ignores a significant humanitarian cost. Responsible parties will do whatever they can to shirk responsibility and affected parties will have to waste years of their lives trying to regain safe shelter through bureaucracy. Sometimes it feels hopeless.
That's just the local version of the resource curse. Imagine living in a whole country like that. The world economy is when you look at it rationally completely bonkers, we dig stuff up in one place to burn it elsewhere, we make stuff here to use it thousands of km away. Without all that cheap transportation, which in itself is a big contributor to the emissions we'd be forced to solve our problems locally. All that we do today is to destroy the planet whilst pretend externalizing the costs. But it is one planet, and there is no externalization happening so in the end it all goes down, the only thing we are doing is to lower the lows and to raise the peaks temporarily at the expense of the future.
> Could you imagine the outcry if a fracking induced earthquake took down a 13th century church someplace? No one wants that.
Seems like an straightforward case of externalities?
Coasian bargaining and/or Pigovian taxes can deal with them.
Yes, 13th century churches have value, but so do a lot of other things, like convenience or reducing CO2 emissions.
You can fix teetering systems with money.
Politically, you'd want to be careful to align who benefits from fracking (eg via taxes) and who bears the burden (eg from minor earthquakes). So if the dangers of fracking extent to about, say, 30km from the side of where the well sits, you'd want to make sure that the tax revenues and authority to decide on whether to allow fracking and what obligations to put on frackers should also roughly occur on that level of 30km. Eg within a county perhaps.
This way the voters in different counties can make up their mind about what they want to allow, and what they ask for in return.
Perhaps they want the frackers to post a billion dollar bond underwritten by a major re-insurance company as insurance for that 13th century church, before they allow fracking. Write the contract in such a way that any earthquake damage to that church would be covered, without need for proof that fracking was to blame.
This is so wonderfully naive to the realities of contract negotiations between large corporates and governments.
There is an asymmetry here which works agains the public good. Corporations tend to only have to corrupt an offici or capture a regulatory body once to extract long term concessions, which rarely if ever get rolled back. The same is not true in reverse.
In practice this means governments aren’t able to effectively exert democratic mandates over policy areas like this.
The government is vastly more powerful than companies. The government can make arbitrary rules (= laws) that the company has to abide by. The company has no such power.
> In practice this means governments aren’t able to effectively exert democratic mandates over policy areas like this.
How did the Germans ever shut down their nuclear power plants? They were already up and running, so they were literally printing money for their corporate owners?
How did GDPR pass in Europe? Why can't Google build housing for their employees in Mountain View?
I would like to live in your utopia where companies are all powerful!
This is a case of ideology over strategic thinking for Europe, IMHO, and we've seen, and are seeing, the consequences of relying of foreign imports instead.
We just care more about pollution in Europe. Greenhouse emissions aren't the only environmental problems (and those are also worsened by fracking of course as it's still a means of producing fossil fuels)
I totally support our stance against fracking. And the dependency on Russia was a bit of an issue for the first winter of the war but prices are back to normal now.
Dependency has not gone away. We still import plenty but now from US and Qatar (I.e US are again winning while we are again losing).
It's not even about pollution. To say banalities like "we care more about pollution" means nothing and is not aligned with reality. Again, the issue is ideology. This is failing Europe in many areas, not just this.
We do care a hell of a lot more about pollution that most of the world. In the Netherlands half the country is at a standstill because some Nitrogen levels are too high. Building projects are stopped, farmers have to reduce fertilising etc. Even the maximum speed was reduced nationwide, not because of CO2 emissions but because of nitrogen messing with local ecosystems.
I support that, but it's very important to realise that this is pretty unique in the world. "Green parties" are a huge thing and often even part of governments, is there even one in the US? :)
And yeah we still import but you can't change things from one day to another.
You are wrong. Paris literally this week voted to tax SUVs from the city, in part because of pollution. It also speaks to a wider concern here not to allow commerce to dominate other public goods.
The Paris' mayor has very poor approval ratings and has organised a populist referendum on a dubious proposal to try to prop herself up... not a very good example, IMHO.
"Not allow commerce to..." thrown left and right: if that's not a typical ideological stance in Europe, I don't know what is.
> "Not allow commerce to..." thrown left and right: if that's not a typical ideological stance in Europe, I don't know what is.
Yeah but that's a good thing in my book.
The US tends to be very unbalanced in this regard, commerce all the way and not much attention to externalities, both environmental and societal (e.g. welfare and labour rights)
Europe is substantially different from an ideological perspective and that provides us with a much better quality of life (much lower violent crime, much better public transport, no crazy healthcare prices, greener cities etc).
Of course the US does better economically but economy isn't everything. And it's a self-defeating goal anyway, the more money people have, the more they spend on scarce housing and other goods which means the housing crisis is just as bad in the US as it is here despite the higher salaries there.
> The Paris' mayor has very poor approval ratings and has organised a populist referendum on a dubious proposal to try to prop herself up... not a very good example, IMHO.
Paris is far from the only city in Europe banning the most polluting vehicles. Almost every major city does this now. And the air quality really did improve due to this. And our cities are just a lot more smaller scale due to the longer history - there's a reason the smart was invented here :)
> And the dependency on Russia was a bit of an issue for the first winter of the war but prices are back to normal now.
I am all for "let's cut the gas" blabla, but it's a bit unfair to say "prices are back to normal" (which is also not entirely true from the consumer perspective): lots of companies had to shut down, some will, some left to go to other "better" places, some fired thousands of people because of energy prices. I don't see that coming back any time soon, to be honest.
> we've seen, and are seeing, the consequences of relying of foreign imports instead.
In my opinion, you're confusing bad political choices (=let's get addicted to Russian gas, then we will see about it in 10 years) with everything else. Germany could have done more in the past 10 years to not get to the point in 2022 to be threatened by a country - they didn't, now they have to brute-force innovation/renovation.
I would just like to remind you that US is still buying a quarter of necessary enriched uranium from Russia, and US doesn't seem a country of "ideology" as you claim. If Russia wants to retaliate today, it's really bad news.
> I would just like to remind you that US is still buying a quarter of necessary enriched uranium from Russia, and US doesn't seem a country of "ideology" as you claim. If Russia wants to retaliate today, it's really bad news.
There's plenty of uranium to go around from alternate, more friendly suppliers. Uranium is also only a small part of the costs of running a nuclear power plant.
Germany's energy policy is the best example in Europe of ideology over pragmatism. The most glaring example is how they decided to exit nuclear with no clean alternative for ideological reasons.
Ban of fracking is not pragmatic, either.
If gas isn't imported from Russia, it is from the US or Qatar, which is the same in terms of foreign power dependency and balance on foreign payments, when shale gas/fracking provides an alternative.
> The most glaring example is how they decided to exit nuclear with no clean alternative for ideological reasons.
I would have said fear rather than ideology, to be honest. It was the times of Chernobyl and later Fukushima gave the last blow. It's a bit unfair to "forget" what happened 40 and 20 years ago - things must be contextualized.
> If gas isn't imported from Russia, it is from the US or Qatar, which is the same in terms of foreign power dependency and balance on foreign payments, when shale gas/fracking provides an alternative.
It's different in the sense that you don't depend entirely on a single country for your gas (like it was before), so that particular country cannot threaten you like they did. The goal of this governement is to drastically reduce energy consumption and use renewables, while at the same time "buying" gas from wherever else.
This was for a political reason, otherwise they would have kept on buying gas from Russia and implemented slowly their green/eco program.
The issue is not fracking yes or no, but the fact that in the previous 10-15 years it wasn't done enough to avoid what happened in 2022.
> I would have said fear rather than ideology, to be honest. It was the times of Chernobyl and later Fukushima gave the last blow. It's a bit unfair to "forget" what happened 40 and 20 years ago - things must be contextualized.
Well, voters are still idiots: even with the accidents in Chernobyl and Fukushima accounted for, nuclear power still kills far fewer people per Joule than basically any other form of power generation. And that includes renewables. (Though large scale solar doesn't look nearly as bad, if you separate out residential rooftop solar into its own category.)
The German reactors are also of a design that can not have the kinds of accidents they had in those two examples.
Voters are usually biased and shaped by what they see on TV.
If TV shows a disaster in a nuclear plant that can lead to X, they will just connect "nuclear plants are dangerous".
Plus, there is still the unresolved issue about the nuclear waste which is another reason for concern/fear.
I wouldn't dismiss the reasons to be concerned - it's just that they did a campaign based on fear, and this type of thing typically doesn't lead to good solutions. So you go and vote but with a heavy bias in your heart: are you going to be responsible for destroying "the world"? Nobody wants to be that guy.
TV should have done a better job at informing people, so that ideally they could have made up their mind on their own, considering a variety of scenarios and not just one: a nuclear plant explosion.
It's also true that Germany and other countries (like Italy) were affected when Chernobyl happened - I do remember of people saying that it wasn't safe back then to eat some products because of the radioactivity levels. People don't want that again. And all TV did was (I guess?) reminding them how it was just 10-20 years before. When Fukushima happened it brought all back in an instant.
Europe had ~8 billion tons of emissions vs vs 5.5 for North America, and the recent numbers are 5 for Europe and 6.3 for NA. I think they managed to do more in the wrong direction.
Yeah, not sure about this graph, it hides convenient facts. Germany is growing ever steadily and is the biggest country people-wise, and also the one with one of the biggest climate/energy impacts in Europe. No one cares about Montenegro shrinking in population size. Or Norway, Iceland with their water-powered energy grid. It depends on the countries shrinking or growing, doesn't it?
> Germany is growing ever steadily and is the biggest country people-wise, [...]
Interesting, I was under the impression that the German population is declining. But you are right, it is slowly growing. In eg 1990 they had 73 million people, and nowadays it's 83 million (according to Google).
Apparently that's all driven by net migration, because the birth rate is so low.
There were a few pretty big migration waves. Kosovo/ex Yugoslavia in the 90s, Ukraine, 2015 (middle east) etc. Where each brought > 1 million new people. So Germans are on the decline, but we're adding a lot of migration via the asylum system in.
This is not really a mitigating factor in emissions, esp since US per capita emissions are vastly bigger than EU. And if you get into the per capita game, the other parts of the world would like a word...
The Germans had very little nuclear power (and would probably have taken decades to build a single new one even if they had wanted to). The German decision to quit nuclear had basically no impact on EU energy generation. (It had an effect on German emissions, but even that effect is small).
It had on grid stability though. Our neighbours still hate us for that ;) the grid has to capture our instability due to renewables and it's a point of debate.
> the Germans had turned their back on almost emission free nuclear power, and in practice had turned towards very dirty coal.
Before Russia invaded Ukraine, coal was shrinking even faster than nuclear in Germany. Coal usage only temporarily went up in 2022 as emergency measure.
America has 2x the German per capita CO2 and 3x the UK per capita.
All have reduced this stat over the last few decades so the US might have reduced more absolutely, because they were so high in the first place, but the EU appears to be outpacing them and extending their lead.
So it's weird, but unsurprising to see this painted as a triumph for fracked gas, and used to attack Germany's progress.
The 4 last old nuclear plants which were switched off last year wouldn't have been switched to coal if it wasn't for Putin's war of aggression in Ukraine.
Coal in Germany will end in 2030 anyway and the renewables are built at a pace to support that.
With nuclear power (especially with new plants) Germany could transition off CO2 producing fuels faster.
Remember: renewables are not actively good for reducing CO2. They don't suck CO2 out of the atmosphere, they are at best neutral. Renewable are good insofar as they allow us to move away from fossil fuels.
Moreover a single nuclear unit costs billions to build, billions to maintain, billions to dismantle, all under control of a single entity/company. Whereas renewable costs are much more spread, can be managed by many different companies, etc.
> Moreover a single nuclear unit costs billions to build, billions to maintain, billions to dismantle, all under control of a single entity/company. Whereas renewable costs are much more spread, can be managed by many different companies, etc.
The government should ask nuclear power companies to post a bond upfront to pay for the dismantling.
I don't think the whole 'single entity' thing is that bad. Nuclear power plants are still relatively small compared to the whole power infrastructure of a country. They are not more concentrated than eg hydro-electric generation from dams.
Just to be clear: I'm not arguing against renewables here. I'm arguing against turning off nuclear power plants that are already running, and have modern-enough safety features.
(Though I would argue against giving direct subsidies to both nuclear power plants and renewables. You should tax emissions, and let the market sort it out. You can even re-distribute the take from that tax to all voters, so that the average person doesn't have any extra tax burden.)
In Germany, the government is paying for the dismantling. All external cost of nuclear was and is payed for by the government, safe some small token contributions by the companies in the beginning. Those got the profits instead.
Germany had so little nuclear power left that leaving them running had no impact in the roadmap for green energies and energy prices. They had to be shut down anyway soon since they were old and insecure.
Those nuclear power plants were already there and running. Also, they were quite modern and safe compared to many other nuclear power plants in Europe.
It takes decades to build new nuclear plants. This won’t solve anything until they are built.
Renewables /are/ good for reducing CO2, as every kW produced by renewable is not produced by CO2-emitting alternative. Plus, they make you independent from foreign energy sources.
Yes, it takes decades to build new nuclear plants. And the Greens in Germany (amongst other political parties) have been blocking new nuclear power plants for exactly those decades.
More pertinently: those nuclear power plants they shut off were already running. Keeping a plant running takes exactly 0 years.
(You can't really blame German politics here: they just deliver what German voters want. Democracy working as intended.)
> Renewables /are/ good for reducing CO2, as every kW produced by renewable is not produced by CO2-emitting alternative.
Yes, that's exactly what I wrote?
> Plus, they make you independent from foreign energy sources.
That's a separate discussion. Wind energy in Germany and burning German coal is independent of foreign energy sources. Burning Russian oil or importing electricity from photovoltaic in the Sahara are both foreign energy sources as far as Germany is concerned.
As long as you make sure that your foreign imports come from a wide variety of friendly countries, that's not too bad. Eg Germany importing nuclear power from France or wind power from British off-shore farms doesn't seem very concerning to me.
It's Germany, they've already built them. About a decade ago they had 17 reactors in operation powering about a quarter of the country. Three years ago they had 6 in operation responsible for about 13% of produced electricity.
The decision to decomission them is a political one, made directly after Fukushima, and fully completed last year. Nothing to do with building them, public was against them and the government listened.
My point being when Germany says they're gonna stop using coal and go all in on renewables, there's historical evidence that they'll follow through. It's just gonna take some years to complete.
You need energy now. Nuclear was phased out. That's it. That was the decision. And in 2021 was "barely" producing 13% of electric energy with the last 6 reactors.
So either you follow one approach (= mix between imports and solar/wind) or the other (=import until 2032, then import and produce with nuclear energy), with the first approach being oriented to the long run (=independent from other countries, less co2 emissions, etc.).
The largest owner of wind power installations in Sweden is China. The 5 largest producers of electricity from wind power, 3 of them are foreign (Finland, Germany and Norway).
But the knowledge and systems for producing wind tech are well distributed. A blockade of Finland would be only a small bump in the road. Not like setting the Middle East on fire is for gas.
They were switched off long AFTER the war had started. The situation by then was totally clear for everyone. The only reason why the nuclear power plants were not keept running for another few years was ideology, and it was a mistake.
It always pizzles me, when people seem to think German gas imports from Russia are a recent thing. They are not, they date back to the 70s, the hight of the Cold War, when the imports came from the USSR (!). Reliably and cheap, I might add. And none of that had anything to do with climate change back then.
Fracking is bad not only because it generates CO2 but it's very polluting as well. This is why it's not popular here. Emissions aren't the only thing. The Netherlands just shut down their gas fields because it's causing too many earthquakes.
And I really applaud Germany's decision, the coal is temporary and will be replaced by renewable too. Nuclear is just too expensive, long-term dangerous and sensitive to mess with. Again, emissions aren't the only thing that counts. And this also plays into the nuclear discussion because nuclear advocates often claim very low death tolls from nuclear, but ignore environmental pollution problems.
> the coal is temporary and will be replaced by renewable too. Nuclear is just too expensive, long-term dangerous and sensitive to mess with.
Ok, but keeping plants open a little longer would bave still helped. I see no reason to start building new nuclear plants, but keeping them running a few more years safely and cheaply was doable and would have been a better option for the environment and the economy, making the green shift more palatable.
As far as I understand though, it was a bit of a back against the wall thing in that regard because they were mostly coming up on expensive overhauls. The scares with Belgian plants have shown that that can't be postponed forever.
> Nuclear is just too expensive, long-term dangerous and sensitive to mess with.
I'm not so sure about the 'long-term dangerous'. Yes, nuclear produces a small amount of dangerous nuclear waste. But burning fossil fuels also releases lots of waste, and most of that is made up of stable isotopes that don't even have a half life and will be dangerous approximately forever.
Fugitive emissions of methane (a more potent greenhouse gas than CO2) [1], other gasses which are presumably the reason that people who live near gas fields have higher incidence of cancer, asthma, etc. [2,3], and various chemicals being released into groundwater [4,5], which could also be the causes of the cancer instead of the atmospheric emissions, I don't think there is a strong consensus yet as to which one is responsible and in what proportions.
The widespread pollution from the accidents that have happened in the past. Nuclear cleanup from accidents have been extremely costly projects, not only from Chernobyl (which still has a huge exclusion zone) and Fukishima but there were many other smaller accidents too. And nuclear arms accidents, like the time when the US dumped a few nukes on southern Spain :)
Decommissioning too, very very costly to do it in an environmentally conscious way, the waste is very expensive to store safely. And these costs are generally not even included in the costs. Way too often an energy company vacates a site and the state is left cleaning up the mess which costs billions.
The “widespread pollution” is true in the very short term (as long as you have radioactive iodine floating around), but after that it's pretty much a negligible problem. For instance if you discount iodine-induced thyroid cancer, the cancer rate in the Tchernobyl exclusion zone (for people who refused to flee) isn't higher than in the center of Kyiv (likely because car-induced air pollution is more harmful!).
There are many things that are much more dangerous than the what remains of the fallout from a nuclear accident, that people are perfectly fine living with: air pollution due to ICE-powered cars, pesticide in farm areas, lead fuel near general aviation airfields, or cigarettes, alcohol and even junk food!
People have a very wrong vision of what nuclear fallout actually means, and it's mostly fueled by the nuclear bomb scare in the cold war era. But in the real world even Hiroshima and Nagasaki were quickly re-settled after the bomb with no dramatic effect.
(this is not to say radioactive material is harmless, just that the incorrect perception of its harm lead us to take drastic measures when it comes to nuclear, while we are fine as a society taking little to no measures against much more harmful things)
As for decommissioning, I answered in another comment already, see [1].
The waste that needs to be constantly managed and significantly financed for centuries to come?
As it is the costs of the nuclear waste management are, and will be for a long time, fielded by tax payer and not internalised with the plant builders/operators.
All you think you know about nuclear waste is a lie.
First, the amount of waste that last centuries fits in a single room per nuclear country. Also you don't need to manage or finance it at all, you can just leave it there an be fine with it:
In fact when nuclear was still being treated like a regular industry with respect to its pollution, the nuclear wastes from the military and early civilian programs in UK and France were being dumped in the middle of the Channel. Not that I'm saying that this is a good thing, at all, but it's also causing no harm in practice and because the quantities are so small, the environmental impact of doing so is much smaller than the routine wastes of most industries, including IT.
Also, we've known the solution to waste for 60 years now: it's called a breeding reactor. 40 years ago France had one prototype (Phénix) and wanted to scale it up to industrial size (Superphénix) but it was canceled due to pressure from Greenpeace (including a successful campaign to pressure the Swiss government to fight the project)! Then 30 years later Greenpeace is conveniently still using the nuclear wastes argument.
Another thing about waste: burning fossil fuels also produces waste. A colossal amount of waste. That waste is mostly made up of stable isotopes, so has approximately an infinite half-life.
Eg mercury release from burning coal will be dangerous forever.
It always annoy me when people talk about nuclear waste living millions of years. I'm like “you know what's living longer than that? A good chunk of industrial pollutants who actually have an infinite lifetime”.
Yeah same with plant decommissioning. This is rarely incorporated into the business model. Even the building of the plants is often heavily sponsored. This made sense during the cold war due to side production of isotopes and general capabilities and expertise (and I believe this is the main reason why nuclear arms countries have such prolific nuclear power as well).
But really these days it makes no sense. The reason these costs are not borne by the operators is because the business model would be impossible if all costs were included. As it is even with all the handouts it's hard to make it work cost-wise.
The thing is: why is nuclear the only industry that has to finance its own decommissioning in the first place?
Why are other industries allowed to just put a locker on the front door and call it a day? Decommissioning and waste processing of solar plants isn't included in the cost either. In most industries it is expected that the site is secured (which, in case of an NPP means removing the old fuel obviously) and then the next guy who wants to use the site pays for the destruction of the buildings (or in practice the taxpayers as subsidies to improve “competitiveness” of the region). But somehow not nuclear.
Industrial countries are filled with old industrial sites with massive amounts of remaining pollution (heavy metal in the soil, asbestos in the buildings), the industrials never paid for decommissioning.
In fact I think that the policy we apply to nuclear is the right one, and for effluents as well (unlike chemical plants that litters the neighborhood with PFAS, NPP reject practically nothing whatsoever), as it is the only sustainable model. But then again why the double standard? Why apply it only to nuclear?
The answer is unfortunately the irrational fear of nuclear that derives from the stigma of the cold war and the fear of the Bomb…
Coal usage is on the downturn in almost all countries, India aside. Global Coal demand appears to have peaked and will decline from this point forward.
From the International Energy Agency:
Global coal supply likely peaked in 2023 and then to decline
International Energy Agency Global Coal Report December 2023 (released Friday 15th December 2023)
Global coal production is forecast to have risen by 1.8% in 2023, with continued growth in India, China and Indonesia more than offsetting declines in the United States and the European Union.
Thus, 2023 marks another all-time high in global coal production, totalling 8 741 Mt. [...]
For the forecast period, we expect a net reduction in global coal production starting in 2024, which would mean global coal production peaking in 2023 in line with global coal demand.
Ongoing declines in the United States and the European Union are likely to be complemented by reduced production volumes in Indonesia, as Chinese demand for seaborne thermal coal is likely to decrease.
The last bastion of remarkable growth in production is India, serving the growing demand from its power sector.
Our model suggests that declines in other countries will more than offset this growth, resulting in global production of 8 394 Mt in 2026.
Unfortunately this transition comes at a price. Average household power prices for 2023 are 45,73ct/kWh in Germany[1] even after a tax reduction in 2022.
Leaving nuclear energy behind while committing to exit coal as well in addition to being cut out cheap gas places Germany in a very difficult position. Especially to maintain their industry.
For main European countries the kWh prices are rising as well[2].
One idea that is catching on is shifting taxes and green levies from electricity to gas as the grid gets cleaner.
You can also sometimes make exceptions for specific use cases, e.g. stop charging the extra fees on electric trains or EV charging or any other use of electricity that is directly displacing fossil fuels.
Sure but that's just shifting the burden from one place to another. It doesn't take away the fact that cost of living in Germany has increased due to the shift to renewable energy.
(disclaimer: I'm not against renewable energy, I just think we should not look away from reality)
"Shifting the burden" to the places with externalities is perhaps the key idea driving the renewable revolution and is a tool aimed at increasing theoretical efficiency, literally making us all wealthier.
I would love a good new but the use of percentages everywhere in the post smell fishy...
"Annual change (%)" for different generations mode:
Huzzza significant low from 2022 while this year we have a hot winter and 2022 was especially cold.
Later "Share by source (%)" but no indication of the overall trend do we produce more or less overall?
I don't say it's false, but should someone want to dress some data point and bend reality a little to prove a point this would be a "good" strategy.
Also today the Swedish investigators suspended their investigation. "The conclusion of the investigation is that Swedish jurisdiction does not apply and that the investigation therefore should be closed," the Swedish Prosecution Authority said in a statement. [1]
> On 8 February 2023, American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh published an article on his Substack page in which he alleged that the attack was ordered by the White House and carried out utilizing American and Norwegian assets by mining the pipelines in June during BALTOPS 2022 with a subsequent remote controlled detonation. The post relied on a single anonymous source, whom Hersh described as having "direct knowledge of the operational planning." The White House responded to the story by calling it "utterly false and complete fiction". Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs said that those allegations are "nonsense". Norwegian commentator Harald S. Klungtveit challenged the accuracy of Hersh's claims, such as the notion that Alta-class minesweepers had participated in BALTOPS 2022, or that NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg had been cooperating with US intelligence since the Vietnam War, when he was a teenager and fervently opposed to NATO. Subsequently, Hersh stated that the trail the German investigators were following on the "pro-Ukrainian group" that used a rented yacht was a false flag fabrication created by the CIA and fed to US and German outlets.
> People and businesses used less electricity overall, with demand dropping by 3.4% compared to 2022.
The EU isn't even managing to tread water with this transition. Over the last 20 years they've shed ~15% [0] of their energy per capita and more than that in places like Germany or France.
This policy might look sensible if we hit peak oil sometimes soon, but realistically this is an indictment of the anti-nuclear movement who caused a lot of unnecessary harm. We didn't have to do this by squeezing people's living standards. That energy is needed to promote high living standards.
Frankly I'm surprised that the body politic are taking it (although I'll cough a few times and mention Brexit, AfD and apparently the French are unhappy).
We haven't squeezed living standards? Take two examples: LED lights and heat pumps.
Replacing incandescent bulbs and direct heating hasn't made us poorer. Just more efficient.
Many countries have decoupled economic growth from energy use.[1] My personal theory is that we were stuck based on the marginal cost of fossil fuels. Given the fossil price of energy we had already exploited nearly all avenues.
Renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels and massively scalable. Thus we will once again be in the state with more energy available than what we can use, and we will reliably find new ways of utilizing this.
Nuclear is the antithesis to this. It is more expensive than fossil fuels which means relying on it will entail degrowth compared to our fossil equilibrium.
How much of that 15% drop can you explain with light bulbs and heat pumps? There is no way it is that material. And we know that efficiencies don't cause the amount of energy used to drop, they cause an overall rise, because energy goes further so it is worth collecting more (ie, Jevons' Paradox). The only thing that causes energy use to drop is if the supply isn't there.
> Many countries have decoupled economic growth from energy use.
Yeah, but the obvious conclusion isn't what you expect it is - GDP is becoming obsolete. The reason it has been useful historically is that it is a good proxy for energy availability. You've got a number there that goes up, but is decoupling from any real metric.
If GDP correlates with energy availability and GDP drops; that is an urgent problem because that means it is getting harder to get food, shelter and essentials. If it doesn't correlate with energy availability then there is a bit of a question about why we're supposed to care.
Technically that was co-generation, you got 80 watts of heat to go with it which was lost during the summer (or caused your AC to have to work even harder!) and in the winter you now you have to generate that 80 watts using some other method. But if you drive a heatpump with it you can come out ahead net+.
Germany plans to build dozens of new gas peaker plants. That's a big problem of renewables: you have to keep a huge backup infrastructure. So while your usage of gas and coal goes down, you still have to spend huge sums on the infrastructure - grid, backup, etc. The generation is very cheap, but trying to go 100% renewables is very expensive.
No one wanted to build the gas plants so now Germany decided to pay not for generated electricity but for available capacity. Sadly, the final nuclear reactors where shut down last year.
I'd like to mention the role of corruption in Germany in all this: Gerard Schroder who was essentially bought by the Russians the way I see it.
He initiated the push to close German nuclear reactors and push for renewables + Russian gas for base load to replace clean nuclear. After which he got a nice job with Gazprom in exchange for his "good work".
Russia won, Germany (and by extension all of the EU) lost IMO. EU essentially funded part of the war against Ukraine in the early days, because Germany had made itself (temporarily) dependent on Russian gas.
The only country in Europe who was immune to all of this outside influence and even benefittted: nuclear country France (the biggest net exporter of electricity in the EU last time I checked).
Why is this post above downvoted? The opinion in the last sentence aside, the post is just stating facts.
Whether one supports the German plan to rely on gas-peaker plants or not, it is undeniably expensive to build and maintain plants that are not fully utilized but rather only act as a backup for times when renewables produce too little.
The German government just decided to subsidize the construction of these plants with the equivalent of 17 billion USD [1]. It is already clear that more subsidies will be required [2].
> but trying to go 100% renewables is very expensive.
Any source for that claim? I mean, yes it’s not exactly cheap. But neither are the alternatives. Expensive compared to what?
I’ve seen several studies that indicate that going 100% renewable will be cheaper than the energy infrastructure we have today. Either in a 2050-perspective with the technology/prices we have today (Marc Z Jacobsen). Or on a shorter timeline assuming continues technology and price improvements (Tony Seba).
> Sadly, the final nuclear reactors were shut down last year.
I think it remains to be seen which path was the right decision. France has recently had some very expensive and long outages. They had to import power from Germany for long stretches during the energy crisis. France has also had some downtime due to hot weather, something we’ll be seeing more of.
Most of these nuclear power plants are old. And if they can’t be relied upon as actual base load, what’s the point?
I think going 100% renewables could have some major benefits in focus (no need for government to spend resources on regulating nuclear power) and synergies (you get lots of excess cheap electricity that can be used to make hydrogen which can be used to decarbonise steel and fertiliser production, and you invest more in battery R&D which also benefits cars and off-grid applications).
We’re also starting to see that advanced geothermal could become a viable alternative to nuclear. I believe that would be a huge Hail Mary to the energy transition because it’ll be easier to get people from the oil and gas section aboard. That will give a lot more political willpower for the transition.
We already can see that France produces less than half the CO2 that Germany does, per year. So, it is absolutely unequivocal that France's strategy was and continues to be better. Even if it takes the French 20 more years than Germany to get to fully renewable, they will still be better for the environment. CO2 is additive, so every ton (or, at this scale, every hundred million tons) you don't emit today is a massive win.
And don't expect Germany to actually hit any of its targets for renewables. Operating a fully renewable grid in a continental country so far up north is not an easy thing to do.
> I think it remains to be seen which path was the right decision. France has recently had some very expensive and long outages. They had to import power from Germany for long stretches during the energy crisis. France has also had some downtime due to hot weather, something we’ll be seeing more of.
> Most of these nuclear power plants are old. And if they can’t be relied upon as actual base load, what’s the point?
Yes and Belgium has had some actually dangerous situations due to the age of their plants.
Grid-scale energy storage is lower cost per kwh than many fossil fuel peaker plants. The solution to the intermittent energy problem doesn't have to be fossil fuels.
I'm going to need a source for this, because the mechanics of storage aren't the same as generation sources which can be switched on and off (power plants "running out of fuel" essentially doesn't happen - no one finding "cheap" grid scale storage though is showing weeks of banked energy).
> EU coal and gas collapse as wind and solar ascend
Ascend to heaven.
Yes, people have started to install solar panels on old houses.
And preparing to cut old, (renewable), forests to install wind, but at the same time they are promoting gas as the next energy source.
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Oil/coal/etc. is distributed 'unhelpfully' for western and asian interests, and it's use once. So the countries which have it must be permanently available for oil trade. Whereas with green energy, barring the provision of somewhat renewable metal supply, states do not need particularly complex diplomatic relationships.
The reason for the world's attention now being drawn to the middle east isn't as simple as Hamas. Europe needs trade open from the middle east, and it needs oil. This is at the heart of trying to balance interests in the region wrt israel.
Both china, us and europe are overwhelmingly against any disruption in the region which is why it hasnt spiraled into a full-blown regional conflict yet.
Issues such as these play strongly on the minds of states as they try to transition. China's "going green" because its a net importer, and very worried about its dependence on russia and the middle east.
This, I think, should give us hope. Whilst going green is an economic hit, it's a massive security boost. And states almost always trade wealth for security (, since, in the end, without secrutiy your wealth will disappear).